Anti-tamper (AT) devices and techniques have long been used to protect and secure proprietary and secret products and information from discovery by either hacking or reverse engineering. AT techniques and reverse engineering techniques constantly develop in response to each other in an ever more complex and intricate interplay of security measures and counter-measures. One particular area where stronger anti-tamper techniques are desirable is in the development of proprietary logic and wiring architectures or hardware-based algorithms.
Another area of interest related to anti-tamper techniques is the encryption of information. Encrypting software or operating parameters or other data in a static state is desirable for securing information and preventing tamper on systems that may be composed of standard or “off the shelf” components.
One of the principal difficulties, especially related to information encryption, is concealing the locations of stored encryption and decryption keys, thereby making it more difficult to unlock and reverse engineer an information storage or information processing system.